Hang on in there.

 Man, what a day. Have you seen the Axios interview Jonathan Swan had with Trump? Holy cow, go look at that thing. Words fail me. There is so much bad with it. His fumbling every answer about the government's COVID-19 response is sad. His dismissal of even pretending to give a shit what John Lewis represented is embarrassing. And once again sending good wishes to Ghislaine Maxwell is just mortifying. This is our president, the guy who holds the nuclear codes. That's the worst part.

 You know, this has gone beyond funny, even in a dark, absurdist sense. We have a stone moron as president, someone who doesn't give a shit about the people he represents if it makes him look bad, is undeniable racist to the point where he's willing and eager to screw over people to continue it, and he's probably wrapped up in the largest underage rape scandal in modern history that doesn't involve the Catholic Church.

 He can't even be bothered to act right, that may be what's yanking my chain most of all. All criticism just rolls off him as being either "fake news" or "presidential harassment" or just people in general being mean and jealous of him. I've sort of skipped out on today - yes, the funk is still here - so I don't know what the general reaction from the Base is, apart from their insistence that Joe Biden is in a constant dementia haze and never leaves his basement. That's their entire argument.

 I may have said it here before, but I am not so much "for Joe Biden" as I am "against Donald Trump". I don't know if it's my allegiance to H.L. Menken's dictum that the only way a reporter should look at a politician is down, my cynicism thanks to the quality of elected officials throughout my adulthood, or just the simple fact that I'm kind of a salty bastard. Regardless, I've never been able to catch that spirit some people seem to get when they get behind a candidate.

 Take this election, for example. I liked some of Bernie Sanders' and Elizabeth Warren's ideas, I liked some of the stances Cory Booker and Julián Castro had, and I liked the way Kamala Harris carried herself. I thought any of the five would make fine executive officers but shed no tears when each dropped out. In fact, apart from Bloomberg and Yang and the Starbucks guy, nobody who was a serious contender was all that bad.

 But we wound up with Joe Biden because the majority of Democratic voters felt he was the best man for the job, and the job at hand is getting Donald Trump and his slimy crew out of power. Biden's got the experience and years, but along with that comes with the normal baggage most people pretend isn't gathered by every politician ever. The 1994 Crime Bill is a stain on his record, sure, but the same people who decry that think it's not a big deal than Bernie Sanders was an avid supporter of it.

 That's politics, though, and people who complain about shit like that or pretend it's a killer don't understand how politics works. They don't understand how journalism works either, for that matter. We're not giving the Beltway Media a pass, but Swan's evisceration of Trump in the Axios interview isn't really that hard. He just kept asking follow-up questions and, more importantly, asking "why do you insist that bit of bullshit is reality?" Any journalist can do that. The reason the Beltway Media doesn't is, for the most part, because they have a vested interest in pretending the office of the Presidency isn't up for grabs to any two-bit hustler who stirs up the lizard brains of enough of the country.

 It's not all on them, though. Up to a certain point, the media - any media - is like any other business: they provide the desired service. As consumers of journalism, it's beholden to the public to not accept the very least done, and unfortunately, we have for generations. It really wasn't up until Nixon and Watergate before that Wall of Silence was shattered. Even so, we've allowed ourselves to believe They're All Crooks, The Media Does Nothing But Lie, and There's Nothing We Can Do About It.

 To do otherwise would require us as citizens to do some actual work, to do some actual thinking. Pretending that's Just The Way It Is takes the responsibility off of us and assigns it to some amorphous entity, so it goes on and on. So the real question is "why doesn't the media do its job".

 The real question is "why don't we do our job?" And that is a good question, indeed.